Direction and Extension are the outstanding characters which differentiate the historical and the scientific (naturhaft) kind of impressibility, and it is totally impossible for a man to have both working creatively within him at the same time. The double meaning of the German word “Ferne” (distance, farness) is illuminating. In the one order of ideas it implies futurity, in the other a spatial interval of standing apart, and the reader will not fail to remark that the historical materialist almost necessarily conceives time as a mathematical dimension, while for the born artist, on the contrary,—as the lyrics of every land show us—the distance-impressions made by deep landscapes, clouds, horizon and setting sun attach themselves without an effort to the sense of a future. The Greek poet denies the future, and consequently he neither sees nor sings of the things of the future; he cleaves to the near, as he belongs to the present, entirely. The natural-science investigator, the productive reasoner in the full sense of the word, whether he be an experimenter like Faraday, a theorist like Galileo, a calculator like Newton, finds in his world only directionless _quantities_ which he measures, tests and arranges. It is only the quantitative that is capable of being grasped through figures, of being causally defined, of being captured in a law or formula, and when it has achieved this, pure nature-knowledge has shot its bolt. All its laws are quantitative connexions, or as the physicist puts it, all physical processes _run a course in space_, an expression which a Greek physicist would have corrected—without altering the fact—into “all physical processes _occur between bodies_” conformably to the space- denying feeling of the Classical soul. The historical kind of impression-process is alien to everything quantitative, and affects a different organ. To World-as-Nature certain modes of apprehension, as to World-as-History certain other modes, are _proper_. We know them and use them every day, without (as yet) having become aware of their opposition. There is _nature-knowledge_ and there is _man-knowledge_; there is _scientific_ experience and there is _vital_ experience. Let the reader track down this contrast into his own inmost being, and he will understand what I mean. All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be described as Morphology. _The Morphology of the mechanical and the extended, a science which discovers and orders nature-laws and causal relations, is called Systematic. The Morphology of the organic, of history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny, is called Physiognomic._ V